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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29961279">as he faced the sun he cast no shadow</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapevine_fires/pseuds/grapevine_fires'>grapevine_fires</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bisexual Richard Gansey III, Growing Old, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Joseph Kavinsky Lives, Letters, M/M, Minor Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, References to Depression, Richard Gansey III is a Good Friend, Richard Gansey III-centric, Sexual Tension, WIP, all of chapter 11 is a product of my extreme boredom and overthinking but its in character so hey, gansey is either this close to a breakdown or actively having a breakdown for the entire thing, i love them, this is definitely a hurt fic but i think its pretty, weird philosophical breakdowns</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 02:00:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,966</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29961279</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapevine_fires/pseuds/grapevine_fires</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of letters from Gansey to Ronan, after Ronan chose Kavinsky.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III &amp; Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. there will come a ruler whose brow is laid in thorn</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>August 24th, 2012</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch21@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Hello.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know I told you that I wouldn’t write for a while.</em>
</p><p><em>But I couldn’t stop thinking about how your eyes looked as you said goodbye, so I’m back. I figure by this point you’ve stopped reading and texted Blue that </em>he’s writing again and i don’t know what to do i thought you said you would talk to him<em>.</em></p><p>
  <em>You’re easy to predict, but I guess that's to be expected after this long.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But I know this, and I’m still writing, Because this isn’t for you; it’s for me. I don’t think you understand: I need to say these things to you like I need to breathe.</em><br/>
<em>I need you to know that every time I lie down in bed and close my eyes I trick myself into thinking that I can hear whispers of you banging around in your room, laughing at some stupid joke Noah told you, or teaching Chainsaw a new trick. Sometimes, if I’m close enough to sleep or if I miss you bad enough, I think I can hear the distant Irish fiddle coming from your headphones, the creak of your mattress as you tap your foot to the music.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is a delightful delusion I have sprung up for myself.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>K is in my head too. Kavinsky, I should say. You told me not to use your name for him. I don’t get how the sound of it coming out of my mouth could be any different than the sound coming from yours, but maybe you just don’t like watching my lips form the words. I sure as hell don’t like watching your lips do the same.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But he’s there. Always. Not in my ears, like the pleasant aspirations of your company that I crave, but I see him in my head.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Not him exactly. You as influenced by him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I see you, smiling, when you see his car idling by the side of the road after school, him behind the wheel waiting to drive you home.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I see your lips wrapped around his dreamt cigarettes, smoke spilling from your mouth, and what hurts is that it looks so beautiful. I don’t know how you do it, Ronan. I really don’t. It’s killing you, that smoke; or it will, given time. But you look beautiful with it twisting above your head.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I see you, laughing, as he cracks a joke about Adam or I.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That one hurts the most.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I try so hard not to think of people as property. I was raised in a world of material wealth. I was valued by my potential: the degrees and certificates of completion and awards I was destined to achieve. My parents were valued by the people they were in contact with as well; their net worth in people.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>My net worth in people was very small, and yet very large. I had a five-foot-even feminist with a voice of fire, a smudgy, supportive friend with a world of fire, a trailer-park aspirationalist with a future of fire, and a hard-edged dreamer with a heart of fire. This was my worth.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I do not want to say that you threw us away, because that would imply that it was all your doing.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But he asked you a question, and you answered in a way that cast us out. Cast me out.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“With me or against me?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It should have been against, Ronan. It should have been against.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know you were tired of waiting. I was, too, but if you had given me just a little more time—</em>
</p><p>
  <em>No. That’s not fair.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I had time to tell you. I had four years to tell you.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But how could you not know?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In every call to the fucking Aglionby admissions office, begging for two more weeks, a second or third or fourth chance.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In every midnight trip to Henrietta Grocery for potato chips or orange juice or whatever other thing we lied would send us to sleep.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In every knock on your door in the first week you moved into Monmouth, asking if you needed anything.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In every time I sat on the floor outside your bedroom through the night in that first week, listening to you cry.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In every time I cried with you.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I’m so very good with words, Ronan. But only long after they’re needed.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I want to ask you what he has that I don’t, but as I’m writing this I realize that it’s courage. He didn’t have to think it over and think it over and think it over. He’s so much more like you than I. I always thought that you needed someone to neutralize your anger, but maybe you just needed someone to talk to it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When I saw you with him that day, I thought that no part of me would ever feel anything but anger ever again. I think that day was the closest I’ve ever come to understanding you.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know that this is horrible, but I wish I could go back to not understanding, because in understanding I realized that he’s just like you.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Brash and confident and dangerous.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He’s just more of all of those, less of the vulnerability that I fell for.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>You need him, I guess. I just hope that you only need him now.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Who knows.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Gansey</em>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. my bones crack open and all the things i've been hiding from you spill out</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter two.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>tw: non-graphic depictions of suicidal thoughts</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <strong>September 2, 2012</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch21@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p class="p2">
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ronan,</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>It is very late. I told Adam that I’d try to work on my sleep schedule now that I’m— now that you don’t live here.He used to say that you were </em>the enabler of your bad habits, Gansey and you know that you’re not gonna get rid of them so long as he lets you get away with it<em>. I miss our fighting. I really do. </em></p><p class="p1"><em>Looking back, it seems like we were always fighting, but I guess a part of me loved it. I loved that we fought all the time; little fights, meaningless ones, all with no real consequence. I always used to think to myself, </em>yes, we’re fighting now, but we’ll get through it.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>There wasn’t a scenario possible in my mind where we weren’t our little family. Our created family.</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>But yes, I’m awake again. I can’t call Adam, because we’d have a long and meaningful conversation in which he skirts around the phrase </em>you’re better off now<em> and I skirt around the phrase </em>I miss him<em>.</em></p><p class="p1">
  <em>I’ve called Adam too many times asking for what I did wrong, and hung up the phone early too many times because I already knew the answer.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>And I can’t call Blue, because she’ll tell me to call you, and I can’t do that.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>What I can do is write. I have no doubt in my mind that you didn’t read past the sender from my last letter, but I cried while writing it. I hadn’t cried since you left with him. I need to.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>School started today, Ronan. Did you know that? Senior year.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>When I was fifteen, I told myself that I wouldn’t get to senior year. You definitely don’t know that, but it’s true. I was with Roger Mallory in Wales, we had gone on a walk and I had fallen to the ground, reenacting my death from those bees. You know this part. You described to me once how it feels when you’re just waking from a dream; the separation from your body, the helplessness. You could watch yourself burn in dreamt fire and wouldn’t be able to do anything except feel the flames kiss your face. That was how this felt. I writhed on the ground and I could feel the bees, Ronan. Really feel them. I could feel their tiny legs on my fingertips, the wings on my eyelids.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>After it was over, I pulled myself up. I got off the ground in fucking Wales, and kept walking, not answering a damn question that Mallory asked me, and on that walk I decided that I was not going to live to see senior year. It was a promise to myself. A happy one. It helped me keep looking for Glendower. I thought that if I found him, maybe I could free myself from whatever the fuck had me, but if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have to deal with it for much longer. It freed me.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You changed my mind, Ronan. Do you want to know the truth? Only a few months after I met you, I went to the Barns to see you for dinner, and when I was walking up to the house I looked through the front windows from where I was standing on the lawn, and I saw you hugging Matthew. You hugged him once, and then picked him up and spun him around, his legs flying in the air behind him. You put him down, threw your head back and laughed. He must have been thirteen or fourteen, you sixteen, and the action was stolen from a childhood I never witnessed. I wanted more of it. I wanted more of you, Ronan.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I wanted more time.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I was sixteen. Only one more year seemed like not enough. I wanted to be there for long enough to make you laugh like that. God, Ronan. I hope he makes you laugh like that.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Well, anyway. School started today and I walked through those doors with Adam alone. Noah didn’t have the strength for it. Since you left, Noah hasn’t had the strength for much, although he sometimes leaves notes. Notes on the mirrors after a shower, in the dust on the pool table. That kind of thing.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I wish Blue could come to Aglionby, Maura always says things are better in three.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>It felt off without you there. I kept hearing snide comments and the sounds of your chair creaking as you leaned back on two legs during Latin. Cabeswater has always had a way of making me hear the things I want to, and, well, we were a good three.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I hear you’re back at the Barns for good. I’m glad, you always said that you wanted to live there full time. And I hear Kavinsky’s with you. I hope he’s being good. I hope you’re being good.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Occasionally Adam will fall, or get lightheaded, a couple times I’ve actually had to catch him. He says that you guys are doing something big.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Did you ever dream me that world I asked you to?</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I asked it too carelessly.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Regardless, be careful.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thank you for reading! leave a comment if you liked it and stay tuned for more chapters.</p><p>chapter title: from the song "the same things happening to me all the time even in my dreams" by teen suicide</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. here i dreamt i was an architect</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter three.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <strong>September 11, 2012</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch21@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ronan,</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I had a dream about you last night. </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>This in and of itself wasn’t surprising, I dream of you all the time. It’s just that— I don’t know how to put this, but you were just… happy. </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You were different than before. Usually when I dream of you, it’s of the worst of before. I dream of bursting into your room and finding you, paralyzed, arms coated in blood, staring helplessly at the ceiling, unable to help yourself. </em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>I dream of sitting in that hospital chair in the waiting room, watching Matthew dose off on Declan’s shoulder, and me, looking up at the ceiling and praying to something, anything </em>please let him be alright, he’s why I’m alright please please please plea—</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Sometimes I dream of finding you in your room, arms covered in blood, but it’s not post dream-paralysis that keeps your eyes fixed on the ceiling. In these dreams you don’t wake up, but I do, clutching my pillow and reaching for you. Those are the nights that I call Blue. She’s good at talking me out of things.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Tonight I dreamt you were happy. It was a short dream, just a couple of minutes, really. Or— scenes. I don’t really know how dream-time works. Is there time in dreams? It all seems like it’s fraying around the edges.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Anyway. In this dream I remember clearly that you were crying. Just light tears, the kind of ones that used to happen when you weren’t really that sad, but were trying to hold back from getting sadder. They collect in the corners of your eyes and rest on your bottom lashes and only rarely fall to your cheeks.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I don’t think you ever knew how much I watched you. I was always looking at you, Ronan; you were always looking at the sky.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>So, right, I have to stay on topic. Not that you’re reading anyway. Two weeks, two letters, no responses. That’s okay. I never asked you to respond, and you have no need to talk to me like I have a need to talk to you. You’re my release.Back to the topic. Okay. So, in my dream you were crying that little hold-back cry. You were turned half away from me, I could only just see the bridge of your nose and cheekbones, the slump of your shoulders. I said your name, and you turned around.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You looked at me, and smiled.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I was Atlas, relieved of the weight of the world.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>In my dream, I came closer and put a hand on your shoulder, and after a moment I realized that it wasn’t my hand on your shoulder. I held up my other hand to see that both were unfamiliar. These hands had rings on three of their fingers, chunky and vulgar and barbaric. There were burn marks on the tops of the pointer fingers from hundreds of absent-minded cigarettes burned to the filter.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>"K," you said, smiling up at me, and the world fell back to my shoulders.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You laughed, stood up, and wrapped an arm around my waist; the touch comfortable and easy and true.</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>You were so vivid and high definition that it hurt to look at you. Every line and hard edge and shape in your face was real </em>ad nauseum<em>. I couldn’t do it, Ronan. I couldn’t deal with your happiness as done by Kavinsky, but there it was.</em></p><p class="p1">
  <em>I woke up.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>As bad as it is, I think a bit of me was relieved when I found you all torn up that day. I saw what I thought was a true symptom of a hurting boy, and I thought well finally I have him figured out. He’s like me.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>And I was glad you were like me.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>It was relief mixed in with the worry in that hospital room. You were no longer an enigma.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I am calculated and confident and overthinking where you are restless and impulsive and vulnerable. I couldn’t stand you not being an unknown, and when a small part of you showed up that I knew would make you depend on me, if even for a little while, I was relieved.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I think that I wanted you to depend on me, and Kavinsky wanted to you worship him.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Life has been hard for you, Ronan Lynch. You have been stolen from time and time again, so dependency must be hard. I know that now.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>It is easy to pray to a false god if you are standing before his church.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>I hope you’re well.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thank you for sticking with it another chapter! comment what you thought, and keep checking back for more, because it's definitely on the way due to the fact that i love these boys and i Do Not love paying attention in school. </p><p> </p><p>chapter title: from the song "Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect" by The Decemberists</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. soft as fontanelle, the feathers in the thread, and all i ever meant to do was keep you.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter four.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <strong>October 1, 2012</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch21@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ronan,</em>
</p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Good morning. </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>It is a good morning at the Barns, isn’t it? I’m writing today because I woke up to sun on my face. It was warm, strong; even when I closed my eyes I could still see the honey glow of it beneath my eyelids. You love sun like this. You used to always love the way the sun came in the huge windows on the east wall here at Monmouth, and I’d wake many mornings to see you sitting on the floor next to miniature Henrietta and allowing the sun to fall on your shoulders, your arms, your cheeks.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You were never verbal about the things you loved, but I could see that you loved what you loved because you looked as though you would throw the world away for a second more with it.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I’m writing because the sun came in my windows this morning, and I remembered how much you love the morning sun, and I remembered how the sun filled your bedroom at the Barns.</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>I would wake before you whenever I stayed over at yours before Niall.I always woke before you, certain I’d look over and you’d be doing something Ronan-esque like cleaning your nails with the tip of a knife or, fuck, I don’t know, breaking and rebuilding something. But you never were. You were always asleep, fingers curled around the blankets tucked beneath your chin. You had so many blankets on your bed ! Always! I could never think of why you would need so many blankets, but Aurora always insisted that </em>come on, Ronan, the nights are getting longer, and it’s getting colder and you always insist on sleeping with the windows open so just take one more blanket, come on—</p><p class="p1">
  <em>These blankets billowed around you; mist on mountains in the morning, your nose tinted red from the cold air drifting in the open windows. You were so easy to look at when you had your eyes closed.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>The lines of your face were softened in those mornings and you breathed deep and slow.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I would sit there and dream of putting my hand on your back and letting it rise up and down with your breaths.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Back then, you were a boy ignorant to the grayscale life.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>In those early days of you getting to know me by living, me getting to know you by looking, our lives were intertwined by want, not by necessity.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I wish we could have had more time of that.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>More time with life in full color.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I’m in a nostalgic, thinking kind of mood, and as per usual, you are the one I want to place my thoughts on. That hasn’t changed. I want you to know that I don’t think that will ever change.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I woke this morning without opening my eyes, and as I lay there, eyes squeezed tightly shut, I prayed silently that I’d look over and you would be back in your place on the floor next to Henrietta, cooing to Chainsaw as she hopped around in the sunlight, picking at flies and dust.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>But of course it is a grayscale world.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I think that if you were here now, Ronan, and I got to wake before you, I wouldn’t shy away. I’d place my palm on your back or your shoulders and I’d match my breathing with yours, breathing life and reassurances back in, deep and slow.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You were always the thing that most convinced me that I was alive.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I think that I was always the thing that most convinced you of your mortality.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I guess he convinces you of immortality.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>In that case, I hope you do live forever.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thank you for reading!! comment and let me know what you think, and get ready for more!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. the lights we chase, the nights we steal; the things that we take to make us feel this.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter five.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <strong>October 28, 2012</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch21@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ronan,</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>How are you?</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>That was a rhetorical question. I know how you are.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Seeing you tonight was surreal. Flashing cars, raised voices, all of it seeming as though it was out of some bad realization, some teenage fantasy in which there are real-life heroes and villains.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I hate that you aren’t on the side of the heroes.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>But I won’t lie to you, Ronan, you looked good. Sure and strong. Raw power radiated off of you.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>We used to hate those parties of Kavinsky’s. Or at least, I thought we did. Adam and I definitely did. You say you never lie, Ronan, but you’re one of the biggest liars I know. The absence of words doesn’t count as truth.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>These parties were— are grotesque displays of wealth and lavish carelessness. It goes against everything I stand for, what I thought you stood for too.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>All my hours of watching you, you would have thought I’d have taken in more. You love it, don’t you? The thoughtless chaos. The sex and drugs and boomboxes on windshields and cigarettes between bare heels and pavement. You love the whiskey-stained air and bleached-out jeans and body heat and engine grease smeared on bare thighs. Nights that feel as though they will never be not-night, nights so long and so ravishing that you forget the word day. You are gas-powered sexual animalism during these nights, and you are free and wild and unbound by the structure that the world of humans forces on you.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>That I forced on you.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I had never seen this side of you, Ronan. I had seen glimpses, and pushed out of my mind. When you went off, and I could hear the front door to Monmouth slamming shut at eight pm, I’d stay awake until I heard it open again early the next morning.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I preferred to believe the truth that I created. No, I told myself, he’s going to drive to the driveway of the Barns and sit in the parking lot and look at the sky, or he’s going to go to St Agnes and drink, feet propped up on the pews, or he’ll go to Cabeswater and dream another queer little object to fill the few empty corners of the apartment. These were the safe, premeditated scenarios I had you in. They were not up for debate: this was all I would allow my brain to reach.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I think a part of me always knew you were going to him.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I never let myself wonder how Prokopenko and his other countless nameless thugs knew your name, because really I knew why. You went to his parties and sat on top of the Mitsubishi with him and lay your legs across his lap as he ordered his pawns to upraise the wildfire of a teenage wasteland. You wore shitty sunglasses and learned how to smoke without coughing and watched him like I watch you as he called his soldiers to him by name.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You drink up his intimate fame.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You and he would sit up on that car like you did tonight and look upon your sovereign, princes of ruined, stolen, and vulgar land. Your gazes were fiery and emotionless and pornographic.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I was entranced.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I see the draw, now that I’ve been around that reckless youth, Ronan. You were captivating, the two of you, up there and untouchable, sculptures cut by the hand of a drunk, aroused, and ruthlessly unyielding artist.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I wanted to be you, to be that careless, so badly.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>And then you looked at me, and the stare you fixed me with spread vines through the soles of my feet, under the skin of my hands, ripping muscle from bone.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You were not anything I’d ever known.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>When you asked me why I’d come, I truly didn’t know how to answer.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>“I wanted to see you” seemed weak.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>“I was worried” seemed insignificant.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>“I can’t stop thinking about you, even in my dreams and I just needed to see your face, make sure you weren’t dead or ruined or for god’s sake didn’t have a fucking face tattoo or some shit—” seemed like too much, all things considered.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>So I didn’t say anything.</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>Looking back, if I had said “I didn’t mean to”, that might have been the closest to the truth. Because in reality it was a passing phrase from Noah that </em>oh hell did you hear Kavinsky’s gonna have another fucking party tonight, do you wanna bet on what major installment in the town is gonna get destroyed,<em> and then I was brushing him off and heading to school.</em></p><p class="p1">
  <em>It wasn’t until I was halfway home at the end of the day that I realized I wasn’t halfway home at all. I was heading to the abandoned field, the stomping ground of the illegality that is Kavinsky’s playtime.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>And then I saw you and you were just— you were breathtaking in your power.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I can’t— I don’t—</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>It’s too much for me, Ronan; this hurt.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You told me to leave and I did and I wanted so badly to pull you down from that fucking car and take you in my arms and help you in your drunken, war-torn state to my car and drive you home home home home ho</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>But you say home differently now, I guess. More powerfully.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You were always quite a great deal more powerful than me.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You’re just now learning how to use it.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Please. Take care of yourself.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thank you for reading another chapter! you're super cool! </p><p> </p><p>chapter title: from the song "Brother" by Gerard Way</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. i rush to the start; running in circles, chasing our tails</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter six.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <strong>October 28, 2012</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch21@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ronan,</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I tried to fucking hold back before, be civil and controlled and oh-so-very Ganseylike; keep my cool face, show my emotion only to the degree that was needed and nothing more but I just can’t hold back, I can’t stop hearing his words in my head, talking to you with admiration not antagony and—</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I'm writing again. It’s later now. I’ve never sent two in one day before but fuck, Ronan—</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>He called you ‘princess’.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>He used to use that name for you in jeering and name calling; usually followed by some taunt or dare. He called you this when the world was ours and he was trying to steal it. He’s always been such a thief.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I thought he’d only ever steal from you.</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>But— he called you “princess” tonight, Ronan, and you didn’t respond with the flippancy you normally do; a calm “fuck you” or a rude hand gesture or a mean face. You smiled, laughed. </em>Laughed<em>.</em></p><p class="p1">
  <em>‘Princess’, ‘baby’, ‘doll’— all of the names that really just sound like ‘property’ if you listen close enough.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You looked delighted to be owned by him. I guess in a way, you’ve always been the property of someone. Before him it was me, differently. Before me, it was your father. You like being wholly and completely owned, possessed, so that your being is led as a continuation of their beings; your soul is bought and sold and bought again.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Your soul was stolen from within mine.</em>
</p><p class="p1">thief thief thief thief thief thief thief thief thief thie</p><p class="p1">
  <em>License plates and spray paint on garbage cans and ripped gravel and ruined trees spelling out ‘thief’.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Spelling out ‘princess’.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>He called you that tonight amongst other sweet nothings promising a future devoid of me, and you kept moving closer to him. You’d bounce your leg where it rested on his lap, or put a hand on his arm, or lean forward to drum your fingers over his cheekbones, your stare inquisitive and jovial and hungry. You relished in these easy touches, and so did I.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I stood there and pretended to be looking at the sky and I imagined your fingers on me.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You touch him so easily, Ronan. You touched me easily, too, but it felt as though it was an obligation, not a want.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>He is crude where I am regal, but we are both kings of vastly different kingdoms.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I want to touch you like he does.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Words come easily to him in the moment; it takes me hours.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I want to speak to you like he does, like he’s shouting into the wind and it doesn’t matter if the roar covers up his words.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I don’t want to speak like the worlds hangs off every syllable anymore.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I think you’re better with him.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I think he’s better with you.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I think—</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I don’t know what I think.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>:)))))))</p><p>chapter title: from the song "the scientist" by coldplay</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. i'll be looking at the moon but i'll be seeing you</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter seven.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>April 3, 2013</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Ronan, </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Well, spring, as they say, has sprung. Everything is getting quite a bit more vibrant, as opposed to the dull gray of winter. I’ve started walking to school. I know, it’s strange. I’ve just been having strange feelings, getting into the Camaro and having Adam in the passenger seat and— oh that sounded rude. I love the time I spend with Adam, I do; it’s just— we had this sort of hierarchy of friendship that we all fit quite nicely in, and it has erroded. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>It’s a little strange for everyone, and many times I’ll see Adam approach the back seat door of the Pig, hand outstretched before stepping back, giving his head a little shake, and opening the passenger side door. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Your absence is a physical presence.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Speaking of physical presence, or lack thereof, Noah is becoming less and less. You must know this, he always showed up with you as much as with us, but he seems to not have the energy to see even Blue anymore. I think that without the four of us together, he just can’t seem to keep himself tethered to the ground.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>The definition of “us” is dwindling, Ronan. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>You always love spring. As a being founded on creation, this makes a lot of sense. You like seeing things grow and change and become what they are meant to be. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Adam’s lessons with Persephone are going well. At least that’s what he says. He is working himself to the bone here, and so I’ve been doing my hardest not to get into fights with him. I know you see him sometimes. He tries to hide it from me, but I know. If you see him, and you talk to Blue, then the only reason you’re not talking to me is because you must not want to. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>And I’ve just got to let that happen. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>You— you glow with the misfortune of a youth spent on things you shouldn’t have had to think about, Ronan.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>I wanted to save you, protect you— keep you from those things but I guess you needed to turn into them. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right? </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>So go ahead. Become as reckless as your father. I know that you are doing something big. I’d have to be stupid not to know. Cabeswater tells Adam, Blue’s energy leaves, Noah is gone. I gather my truth from the actions of others, Ronan, and don’t insult my— and their— intelligence by acting silent and unknowing when Blue or Adam ask you what you’re doing. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>I know you’ll do what you want. You’ll go off, be reckless, and get yourself killed just like your father and I can’t control it. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>I only hope that you won’t leave as many ripples. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Oh, another thing. Blue and I have been together for the past three months. It’s new, but— simple, I guess. It’s what I need. She is what I need. She is kind and true, and she does not ask more from me than I can give. She is safe and warm, and present. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>This is good for me. I think that she is helping me heal. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>So, yeah, I walk to school every day and I look around. I watch the seasons change around me and it’s a beautiful process. Watching watercolor blues bleed back into the sky. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Yesterday, on the way home, I saw an airplane’s trail across the sky, and I stopped on my walk and watched, waiting until it dissipated. Finally, it did; melting into the azure until I could only see tiny wisps if I stared hard enough for my eyes to burn. All I could think was that you and I could be looking at the same clouds, the same sky, the same moon. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>So now, when I look at the sky, night or day, I think of you. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>You feel worlds away. </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Gansey. </span>
  </em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thank you for reading!</p><p>chapter title from "I'll be seeing you" by billie holiday</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. and i may be troubled but i'm gracious in defeat</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter eight.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <strong>August 21, 2013</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ronan,</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Summer is ending, as it always does, and I am getting that sense of time passing with me, oblivious and wanting, as I always am. This end-of-summer will be different from most, though, because I am going to college. It will be strange to not return to the normal polished and preened Aglionby life, albeit slightly withered by your absence.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I don’t know if Adam told you, but I got into University of Richmond, so I won’t be far. I need comfort, and the Virginia fields and grass and breeze running down from the mountains is what I’ve chosen to grasp onto.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I had always planned on going far, far away for college, because I assumed I would be bringing you with me. You were the only thing I needed to tether me to home; without you I am weightless and floating, expecting no recovery.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>As bad as it sounds, I’ve begun to adapt to life without you in it. It’s been a year now, but it’s finally sinking in.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey-and-Ronan-and-Adam-and-Blue has been shaken down a step, and I’ve begun to understand that it is not a loss that can —or will— be parried.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You have chosen your path, and I must continue on to choose mine.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>That doesn’t mean I don’t think of you.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I think of you in the dead of night, no one but myself to blame, and I trick myself into seeing shadows in the light coming beneath your door, you pacing. I trick myself into tasting orange juice on my tongue, but before long the taste becomes acrid and horrid, almost decaying in my mouth, and I can smell it when I inhale and when I gasp for breath between the shudders that rack my body, shoulders curling in on themselves. I worry for you constantly; sometimes I wonder what you’re doing now, free of Aglionby and the life you always hated.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Tricks, tricks, tricks. You always hated lies.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>There are days too. Bad days, where I catch myself staring at the absence of things. I cannot stop myself from doing this; this empty stare while my mind wanders about the room. It’s a little release from this detailed-filled-everything that I constantly find myself in. I’ll do it while in class, I’ll do it while on the highway.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> I think I understand your disregard for your own bodily safety; it's not a disregard at all, but instead a lack of the knowledge of how to care. This form that I am in-- it's so temporary. So flimsy and purposeless. </span></em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I used to be the main leader of my life, and sometimes in these late nights and absent-stare days I wonder whether it would be easier to hand over the controls, surrender. What if I just became a passenger? I could be pushed and pulled by my circumstance, stay ignorant and content in my helplessness.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>This could be a good way of life for me.</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>I worry about going back to Cabeswater. I haven’t gone back since you left— the thought of returning to a place so wholly </em>you<em> is hard for me to even imagine. </em></p><p class="p1">
  <em>I can't begin to conjure up what could be there in reality, but in my nightmares, I see the trees drenched in black paint, new growths at the base cut off at the bulbs. Rotten fruit, sweet and sickly stinking coats the ground, flies and larvae hatching beneath the bubbling skin of the forgotten treasures you once tended. In dreams the earth cracks in straight rivets, threatening the stability of the forest as a whole, and from my place looking down into the gaping splits, I see moths and centipedes and beetles, possums and rats and snakes climbing to the surface, all coated in black paint. </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>In my dreams you stand by and watch. </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You embodied everything that forest was, and it embodied everything you always were, and I cannot bear a physical representation of your undefeated change. </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>However, the alternative is worse: I am afraid that I would arrive at Cabeswater, walk through the woods to find nothing but more forest, never to return to the magic it once was. This frightens me more than I can say. I’ve lost you; I don’t know that I could handle the loss of this place. A place so magical, so sacred, so holy, ought to be immortal, and I cannot handle being reminded of its mortality.</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>So, I like to imagine it still there, glimmering, nestled in the mountains, waiting for me. Someday I will return. I know that. I will return, and I will find out if you have taken it with you to wherever you go when you sink into the calamity of the home that Kavinsky has led astray. Hopefully when I return there that final time, because it </em>will<em> be the final time, I will not mind to see it has gone. I will look at the oh-so-ordinary birds flitting from tree to ordinary tree, see the meaningless scatter of stones by a happily burbling creek running through, and I’ll smile, sit against a tree, and I’ll feel nothing at all.</em></p><p class="p1">
  <em>I wish that I could not feel anything, like you used to.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You have slipped quite easilyinto the past tense and for the first time, I am not concerned with bringing you back.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em> <span class="Apple-converted-space">No matter how much I might not want to, I'll do as I always have done and trust you. </span> </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em> <span class="Apple-converted-space">I would trust you careless. I would trust you deranged. I would trust you in consciousness' finality. </span> </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>But now, at long last, you are free of me.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thanks for reading!</p><p>chapter title: lyric from the song "in dreams" by ben howard </p><p>(please listen to this song, it's so applicable to this series as a whole)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on it's sword</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter nine</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <strong>January 3, 2014</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ronan,</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>For the first time, I am writing this letter out of moral necessity, not want or emotional need. I feel that I must confess what I have done, so that it is in writing. I do not expect you to see it or know of what has happened but I know that it is important for it to be in writing. I need to be able to look back on physical words in a physical letter sent to you, and it will be proof of what I have seen. Here goes.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I went to the Barns yesterday.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I’m home from college, as you hopefully know, and to say the least, I have not been having a great time. I feel as though I am missing something large, some recklessness and youth that is not being presented to me. I don’t know. It’s probably too-high expectations and false ideas of what life is supposed to be. Regardless, I thought that you were my answer. This is an unhealthy conclusion that I have come to over and over and over in my youth, all to no avail, but it is a mistake that I am beginning to think I will continue making.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>So, seeking you out, I went to the Barns.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I think that in the back of my head, I knew you wouldn’t be there. It was Sunday, and on my way to the countryside I passed St Agnes, the bells tolling through my open windows. I thought that because you gave me up, you might have also given that up. Subscribed to a different religion entirely.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>But I knew you wouldn’t be there. In the moment I successfully convinced myself that I’d arrive on the property and see you, far off down the fields, picking through the grass for critters or making your way to the long barn in search of a dream thing, but looking back, I was just imagining that so that I could have an excuse.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Upon driving up the driveway, through the trees, I thought the house was on fire. I could hear this deafening sound, tearing across the windshield of the Camaro and rattling the side mirrors. It felt like wind, but with the promise of weight, of physical presence. I imagined arriving to see flames eating your home, having to be the one to call someone, anyone, having to see the look in your eyes when you realized it was gone.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>But no, I was wrong. I pulled up to the house and it was intact, frankly quite ordinary looking — as ordinary as a place such like this could be. No flames, no smoke, no charred wood, but the roaring continued, coming to a point and slamming back down around my ears again. It seemed to be coming from the fields past the original hill in what could be considered the backyard. So, I got out of my car and walked. As I breached the hill, the realization dawned that I would see something that I would never unsee, and I was right. I cleared the hill, and stopped. Took a breath, fingertips shaking.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>It was a wasteland.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Greek pillars, resting on the ground in ditches as if dropped, dirt and mud and clumps of grass smeared over marble. Sky-bound songs straining against fiery restraints, gaining inches towards the clouds until ropes of flame drag them back. I walked past giant cages, so tall that they made nearby trees seem inferior, containing murmerings of birds. Sparrows, I think. Maybe doves. It was hard to look at them for too long; every time I seemed to pinpoint an aspect of their physical body, another bird would pass by and the sight would be lost. The flock changed form again and again before my eyes, forming shapes I didn’t know existed, shapes I never would have thought of, shapes that sometimes looked like mouths, teeth, eyes. What confused me is that the bars were far apart. The birds could have slipped through— escape was close and easy to come by and yet they stayed within their confines, twisting around themselves.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>There were things in this field that were hard to comprehend. Biblical, ever-burning bushes, snakes and apples and fruits out of your mind in the branches, eyes glinting emerald green peering through the fire. Cars in new colors with the front half submerged beneath earth, the thrum coming from the ground telling that the engine was running, booming electronic rhythms through the dirt below, through my feet. Hazes of emotion glittering and blowing to and fro in the wind, flashing colors and sounds at me, snippets of my own life where I felt the emotion that they infect me with, smashing into dreammade walls and curling up along their invisible borders. Galaxy shaped irises, floating in reverie.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>The living things were the most striking. Green-tinted foxes growing moss and mushrooms from their backs, horses with hooves of sapphire, and above all, an antelope. The antelope stared at me, it’s coat gleaming and lucid, and as I watched it, I began to notice that it’s horns were bronze, and in a constant state of melting across it’s face. From where I stood, at least fifty feet away, I could smell the singeing of hair and flesh. The antelope shook its head, and droplets of bronze turned the grass black. It looked at me, its face a pained thing, and I understood that it was trapped. To stop its pain was to take something so crucial to its identity.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>There was nothing I could have done but watch.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>There was never anything I could have done but watch.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I stumbled, and fell to my knees, there on the grass, moist earth soaking into the knees of my pants.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I felt like praying. I hate to bring this back to religion once more, but it was quite clear to me that this was spiritual.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>So hard to look at the things in front of me; such a close, twisted resemblance of a consequence-free life, a life uncaring of the impact you had on reality. A chosen separation from reality.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>So I prayed, to you.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Because who could create this but a god?</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thank you for reading! leaving a comment, let me know what you thought! stay tuned for more!</p><p> </p><p>chapter title: from the song "from eden" by hozier</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. hunger burns a bullet hole, a spectre of my mortal soul</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter ten.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p class="p1">
  <strong>June 23, 2015</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ronan,</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Have you ever walked into a room, and the minute you step through the door, forgotten why you came there? What am I saying, of course you have. I think almost everyone must have. The human mind is far too flawed for some to not have. The funny thing about this experience, is that the minute you leave the room once more and continue what you were doing, you remember what your initial purpose was. What drew you there, kept you there for a minute, unblinking.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>This is how I feel returning to Henrietta.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I remember the song the mountains used to draw me in; I remember precisely the siren’s pitch.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I keep trying to remember why exactly I left in the first place. It seemed awfully important that I did so at the time, but I can’t seem to remember why. I think it might have been simply because I thought I should. I was a future Congressman, didn’t you know? I was told time and time again that I was to go to college, get my master's in law, and join the world that I was born into. I think that my parents always expected me to grow out of the childlike fantasies of magic. They tolerated it, endorsed it even, to an extent, because they always thought that I’d grow out of it.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>And I guess I thought that too.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>In leaving for college, I was admitting to myself that this was over, it was done. You had left and so should my obsession with magic. Glendower was dead, you were dead. I should have been dead.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>So I let it die.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Upon returning to Henrietta I realized precisely how much magic there is in my blood. It awoke, and I remembered everything.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I had felt so empty in college like I was missing a part of myself. I chalked this all up to a general disappointment at being away from loved ones, at the upsetting final resting place of Glendower. The loss of that quest hit me harder than I had realized. I had assumed that after losing so much, one more blow wouldn’t seem too heavy. After all, I had lost things close to me before.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>But I am broken, Ronan. There is something gone. I cannot find it in my dorm room, cannot find it in my car, cannot find it in Blue’s arms. Something is missing from within me. I do not know how to retrieve it.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>So, I have resolved to drop out.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I know, right? Who would have thought that the tables would turn in such a manner as this! You, happy.Me, the dropout. That sounded rude. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t expect happiness from you, it’s just that— well— I didn’t expect you’d find it this easily.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I’m back and I’m broken and I need to find something that will find me. I’m going to travel.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Blue is leaving with me, and the two of us are going to find it. I just need to. I don’t know what it could be but I know that it’s out there. I must make my new Glendower, and seek him out with the former passion that I infused my life with.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>We will go to France, and then to Spain. I will search through hills and mountains and back alleys and empty highways. I need to re-romanticize my life; teach myself the worth that I have lost, regain the value and purpose that has slipped through the spaces between my fingers. I miss it like a lung, and I am desperate to reclaim it.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>In all honestly, I do not know why I have found it necessary to tell you this. It has been almost six months since I last wrote, last saw the glorious abomination of the Barns and your reckless abandon and complete disregard for the rules of the world. I tried to never write again. When I dream of you now it is of those cages of birds, trapped within their own mindset— fully capable of escape but lacking the will and mental ability to do so. I dream of engines roaring beneath yards of soil.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>You have always been so trapped, my friend, all while holding the ability to be free right in your peripheral vision.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I write because I am leaving. I write because I want you to know where I am.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I write because with every turn I take in my journey, my eyes will unwittingly seek you out.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I will look around corners and over the tops of passersby's heads, and down long roads and out of the windows of trains and busses and cars, and I will hope that just for a second, my eyes will lock with yours.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>If they did, and if brown eyes met blue for even a split second of time beneath the reality of the world, it would be okay.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I would see you, and we would stare at each other, and then my bus or car or train would keep moving, or a passing tourist would break our line of sight, or we would continue walking in our opposite directions, but we would be okay.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I do not expect a future with you.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I just want a second.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey</em>
</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thanks for reading! leave a comment if you liked it and stay tuned for more chapters :)</p><p> </p><p>chapter title: from the song "spectre" by radiohead</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. all the colors will bleed into one</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>letter eleven.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <strong>March 23, 2017</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Richard Gansey (rgansey@icloud.com) to Ronan Lynch (ronanlynch@gmail.com)</strong>
</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>Subject: &lt;blank&gt;</strong>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ronan,</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Do you ever wonder if, at life’s end, you’ll have all the answers? Since I was young, I was told that I’d learn when I was older, I’d know better when I was older, I’d understand when I was older, and this misaligned belief led to the conclusion that when I was older, I’d know almost everything there was to know. I’d understand how the world works, and why I was put here to keep it doing so. And although I have learned a lot, I wonder if at the end of my life, I’ll know it all. It feels almost too much like a great peak to breach.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I don’t know that I have the tools to do this anymore, I don’t have the fire.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I have traveled to France and London and Spain and Tokyo and Russia and India, I cannot find what I’m looking for. I have spent countless dollars and had experiences that I will boast of for decades and ones that I will never speak of again. I have not yet found what I was searching for.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>It has occurred to me that it might not exist.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>If I could return to a part of my childhood, I could find it. While thinking through my travels, I’ve come to believe that tucked away within the beauty of childish naiveté and nostalgia is the greatest form of knowing, the purest type of purpose. We are, in childhood, closest to the ether then we will be in a long time; we have just come from it. It is in this state that we know exactly what we are to do. Our souls have been ripped from the great Other, and given eyes and a mind and ears and a heart, and we are stripped down to solely the laws of science, of biology. We must eat, we must sleep. There are few rules at this stage, and we follow them and then and only then can feel fulfilled; these rules are easy to complete and fulfillment comes quickly.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>And it is at this stage we learn how to love, how to feel. Mother to child and then after time, child to mother, we are taught the complexity of human intimacy and the cohesive consummation that comes with equally requited care. We spend the rest of our lives searching for this intimate fruition in the arms of lovers, of family, of strangers, all to no avail for this one clear, unadorned reason: it will never feel the same as the time we learned of this love, and learned of the insane possibility that we may continue to breach the barriers of the mind’s cognition of the workings of the world, right until the time of our deaths. This disbelief at our own capacity for learning and feeling is the thing I am looking for; the recognization of the Other within us, and the yearning to return to it. For this reason, I can not imagine a state of arguably higher knowledge and connection to the otherworldliness of consciousness than in the infantile stages of simple being.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I hope to fall back into this simplicity, eyes closed, sedentary and unthinking.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>The only time that I could think would be close to this state would be the few years, few months, few days, few hours before death. I imagine that the closeness, the pull of that same ether, begging your return, would inspire a very interesting and surprisingly similar state of mind.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Clarity in the nearness of nothingness and the coming-together of all you’ve learned: the relief inspiring realization that you will soon go from all-knowing to stripped of being once more.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>The openings into and closings from the world of conscious living give more insight into purpose than any of the blurred, hectic middle. Don’t you find that it is only when you are closest to sleep and waking, that unearth those coveted freedoms of thought that you never were aware existed within your befuddled, twisted soul?</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Something to think about.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>And after figuring this out, I’ve abandoned my search. I am giving up, Ronan. Submitting.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>France and London and Spain and Tokyo and Russia and India have nothing to offer me, so I will wait for answers to present themselves. I will wait, with Blue, and we will let the unknown swallow us whole while remaining alive for the sake of it. For the entertainment.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I hope you have had realizations as grandiose as mine these last few years.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I hope the sun has treated you kindly.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I hope your wax wings haven’t melted.</em>
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Gansey</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thanks!</p><p> </p><p>chapter title: from the song "i still haven't found what i'm looking for" by U2</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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